Pottstown School Board will keep property tax hike to 2.4% state limit

By
Evan Brandt, The Mercury

Friday, January 4, 2013

POTTSTOWN — The Pottstown School Board will limit a property tax increase for the 2013-14 school year to 2.4 percent.

Each year about this time, under the state’s Act 1 legislation, school boards must decide whether to have the administration prepare a preliminary budget for examination, or pledge simply to keep beneath the state-determined index or “cap” for any property tax increases required as part of the budget that gets adopted in June.

The law requires that decision to be made 111 days prior to the spring primary.

That’s because if the board decides it wants to adopt a budget with a tax hike higher than the index allows, it must be approved by voters in that election.

The Pottstown School District has never exceeded the state index in the budgets it has adopted since the law was adopted in 2006.

And now it looks like that will happen again.

The index for the coming year is the same as last year’s — 2.4 percent.

Ironically, the day after the board adopted that budget, which raised taxes to close a gap of $184,000 between revenues and expenses, the state budget was adopted that provided $206,000 more than the administration had anticipated —making the district tax hike unnecessary.

The resolution that relates to the 2013-14 budget was adopted unanimously at the Dec. 20 board meeting.

It vote marks the beginning of a very long budget season.

Usually by February, the governor presents his budget and school officials can begin the arduous task of calculating how much state funding their district will receive — a volatile question in recent years — and how much will be cut, and local taxes raised to balance the budget.

Late last month, the Daniel Boone School District kicked off its budget discussions with talk of eliminating kindergarten and eliminating all extracurricular activities including sports and marching band, eliminating two school buses, and furloughing 40 professional staff, including 28 full time positions.

These measures would be required to close what officials there see as a $5 million deficit.

In the Perkiomen Valley School District, administrators told the board that a 7 percent spending hike would require a tax increase of 10 percent to balance the $96.7 million budget there.

More than half the $5 million shortfall is due to the project payments to the Public School Employees’ Retirement System (PSERS) state-run retirement system, said board member Randy Bennett.